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I have been forced to comment on a great hooha spreading across the internet at present that seems to be getting a lot of people unnecessarily upset. Anyone who has read my blogs in the past will know that I do not approve of corporations and they might therefore be surprised to hear I am not against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. I have always been a bit paranoid about the powers over my head ever since the days they were all poised to destroy us with nuclear missiles at any second so I am slightly surprised at my acceptance of the TTIP myself. There are a number of commentators who are riling up the internet as though they were poking a wasps nest with a stick. Of course the internet is quick to anger and there are millions of people who now oppose the TTIP.

I can’t help thinking that such an opposition is a sign of what I shall call farageing. It seems strange to me that people who consider UKIP to be a group of morons have no problem with applying UKIP logic to the idea of an agreement with the States. I can see where they are coming from to an extent. I have no uncertainty that there will be a lot of negative effects from such a partnership. However I am also sure there will be a great many positive effects from the partnership. Such is the nature of change and if we were not able to put up with it then we would all be living in small villages of mud huts eking out a poor existence from what we could forage and farm in the small patches of land around us, with any excess being taken by marauders. Whilst I might like to try such a way of life for a holiday I don’t think I would like to live there. Change will always bring bad things but at the same time it tends to bring more good, that is why the majority of us would not trade our current homes for one a thousand years ago.

When England joined Europe in the early 1970s we felt a great deal of change. Within a few short years there were an overwhelming number of new goods in the shops at ever reducing prices. Admittedly if you want to buy a decent bit of Deutsch Wurst then you still have to pay a massive amount more than you would in Berlin but at least you have the option. To compare what we can now buy in the stores compared to the early 70s you would be forgiven for thinking that the wartime rationing was still in operation at that time. The breaking down of the barriers in Europe and the loss of customs tariffs on European goods allows us to live the colourful lives we have now rather than the grey lives we had then. It also allows the producers of this country to sell with greater ease in Europe and when the pound becomes weak it means that there are far more customers helping to boost it up again. Back then it was the way in which food improved that I was most impressed by. Nowadays the thing that most people are having trouble buying and the thing that most people are coveting is electronics. Our free trade agreement with Europe does not help too much there because in Europe it is England where the prices of Electronics seem to be most affordable on average. If we had a trade agreement with America then we would suddenly gain the benefit of the fact that America has very low prices on Electronics compared to most other places in the world.

Aside from all the other benefits that might come from a trade agreement we would quickly find our capability to push our country technologically would become far more affordable. Computers, tablets and phones would be cheaper and all the benefits of them would become more attainable. Education would become cheaper for those who use such technologies to push themselves harder. That education would be more useful with an extra market that wishes to trade with us without barriers. This is only one aspect that would be helped by the agreement. Those in favour would touch upon others. Throughout the whole of Europe it is probably England that is positioned most favourably to benefit from this agreement. We share a very similar language to the Americans. They even name it English as it is so similar. For us the agreement will be far easier to slip into than for the Germans or Greeks.

The one failing of the agreement that is being pointed out by the naysayers and is drawing all the negativity is the rights it gives to corporations to use arbitration to challenge governments that adversely affect their business interests. Ironically the people who seem most alarmed by this are the same people who usually wish they could challenge the same governments themselves for all manner of idiocy. They seek to challenge the governments for the idiocy of allowing corporations to challenge the governments. It is true that we consider ourselves to be living in a democracy and we wish our desires to be adhered to. With this in mind we vote for politicians to represent our wishes. Once politicians are in power they can pretty much do what they want for the next 4 – 5 years. What they do is usually appeal to the readers of the most popular newspapers because whatever rubbish is published in them will determine whether they get to keep their job at the end of the period. Corporations are not one of my favourite forms of institution but at least they do listen to the actual democratic majority. There are so many twists in the way that politics works that almost everyone must now be familiar with Winston Churchill having said democracy is the worst form of government. The fact that he then said, ‘except for all those other forms’ meant that he still favoured democracy but simply felt its execution needed work. The beauty of a corporation is that it will listen to the will of the customer. One thing that many corporations have in common is that when they were not attentive enough and flexible enough to do what the customer wanted they went bust. The thing that all the other corporations have in common is that they were attentive enough to do what the customer wanted and they thrived.

In general the TTIP is unlikely to cause a great deal of arbitration to be focussed against our governments. It is a measure that is put in place in such agreements to protect companies in the worst possible circumstances where governments are using unethical levels of protectionism for their own industries. This does not mean arbitration will be absent. There will undoubtedly be some egregious use of the measures and no doubt we will all tut and blame the TTIP. This will not change the fact that we will gain massive benefits from the TTIP. It will also not change the fact that we are entering a new era of democracy. We are being given a far more direct form of democracy than we had before because if we disagree with the way the corporations abuse such measures we have the ability to stop shopping with those corporations. We have the ability to tell our friends to stop shopping with them. With the internet what it is we have the ability to tell the world to stop shopping with them. If the TTIP affects the web to such a degree that we cannot, and if this is something we dislike then we have the ability to set up meshnets, we have the ability to use usenet. We still have a right to free speech, we have the right to say something about these corporations and they will quickly learn that the TTIP does not give them carte blanche to abuse their positions.

There will be change. I have already said this. But we live in a changing world. Think of it not as change but as adaptation. This will be a time of great empowerment for average people, if we want it to be. Moving the emphasis of control away from government towards corporation really moves the emphasis of control into the hands of the people, and that is where it should be.

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